Notes

The Facebook post announcing a new game jam to be hosted by the Phoenix chapter of the International Game Developers Association generated many more comments than items like it usually did. It was because the jam had a corporate sponsor.

This is not to say that real human interactions are not ritualized to the point of mechanic in some ways, but that procedural rhetoric about human life nearly always makes a specific argument: life works this way, life works that way.

One time I asked a software engineer a technical question about a GameCube project we had worked on together. He stopped what he was doing, looked at me blankly for a few seconds, and said, “You know, I’ve smoked so much dope between then and now, there’s no way I’d remember the answer to that.” He went on to be a lead programmer for one of video games’ biggest franchises.

Here it is, I think: the moment the world of video games definitively chunked up into discrete groups and congealed. The emulsifier we used to have, this kind of shared sense of exploring a new medium, simply isn’t working any more.